Radish Plants Get Surprise Neighbors

      When I was a kid, I didn't like radishes. I thought they were too spicy or hot. My grandpa liked them too, so I thought it was a grownup thing--that grownups liked radishes and other vegetables that kids never eat, like beets. But after trying a radish for the first time in a long time, and checking local planting calendars, I thought I'd try growing my own. I picked up a packet of cherry belle radish seeds, which are a cute, small kind of radish and decided to plant them in the same raised bed as where I planted my snap peas. However, I forgot the radishes would end up competing with some bulb flowers that I forgot can come up in late summer.

 

     The funny thing about planting bulb flowers is there's a chance that you forget where you put them. That was the case with my grape hyacinth after I started watering the radish seeds. Within a week or so, at the the beginning of September, they started coming up. I hadn't watered that area all summer because I thought those flowers were spring bloomers, not fall bloomers, so I figured I could just leave them alone. But they came up anyway, after I started watering that area, and since then they've become garden roommates more or less.
    A couple side notes--first, I've confirmed with a local master gardener that the holes in the leaves aren't worth worrying over this late in the season. Second, because I planted the seeds so late in the season, I've been told that it will take a lot longer for them to be ready to eat than what is specified on the packet. I can't wait!

Planting Spinach in a Hanging Basket

I've never planted vegetable seeds in the fall before. It always seemed complicated to take of. But new this year, I decided to give it a try. I checked the Portland Nursery's chart and found that I could plant spinach at the end of August. I love putting spinach in my sandwiches and eating spinach salads, so I picked up a package of spinach seeds, along with some radish seeds (more on that later) at the Down to Earth garden store.

      My pots were already full of other things, and an empty patch of my raised bed would be used for radishes, so I had to find somewhere else to plant them. (Enter the incredibly dead hanging flower basket.) I was able to resurrect its flowers this season for a little while after pruning, but something got to it and killed it. So, I decided to empty the basket, fill it with new dirt from Bi-Mart and plant the seeds in it.
     That week the seedlings started to come up, so I thinned them apart according to the seed packets directions. It will take a while before they are ready to pick and eat, but it's fun to watch them grow in the meantime.

Stock up on seeds

This might not be the best time of year to look for vegetable seeds, but if you look hard enough, you can find some for a great deal. This morning I stopped at a local drug store called Hiron's to browse. Outside the front of the store, I found a lot of vegetable and flower seeds on sale. Each package marked 59¢ regular price was on sale for 10¢! I didn't want to go too crazy, so I used some of my quarters to get just $1 worth of seeds. I bought carrot, parsley, tomato, bunching onion, marigold, lettuce, pepper, cucumber and radish seeds.

I will save most, if not all, of these seeds for next season. I'll have to do more planning for sure to make sure I don't get overwhelmed.

So as you're getting ready for fall, stock up on seeds, trade seeds with fellow gardeners, and plant what you can for your fall and winter crop.

Hotel Gardens

During my vacation in Hawaii, I've seen so many great gardens and landscaping at the hotels and towns I've visited. Some many of the plants grown here would not grow well in Oregon. It is very humid and warm here. However, the impatients grown at the Grand Wailea do well in my backyard. But they grow so much bigger here and spread like a think carpet or blanket.
Here are pictures of some of my favorite plants I've seen here so far:

Gardening in Airports

Gardens and plants catch my eye when I see them in places where I don't expect them--like airport terminals.

At the Seattle-Tacoma airport on Saturday, I saw some planter boxes in the undercover area where I walked from my plane to inside the airport. I thought it was random to see red geraniums in a place surrounded by loud industrial equipment. Most people would probably just pass by them in a hurry to their next flight, but a few may stop for a moment to enjoy their pop of color against the gray Seattle sky. Hopefully more airports do things like this.

Salad Ingredients Travel Short Distance

It's interesting to think that a lot of the we get at the grocery store sometimes has to travel across states to get to where we live--even produce that can just as easily be grown in your back yard.

Although not not all of the ingredients in my salad I ate with dinner last night came from my garden, some of it did. It was fun to be able walk two feet from my back door and pick fresh loose leaf lettuce, basil and chives to add to the mix. If I had grown carrots, I would have added them instead of the ones I got from the store. Maybe someday.

The lettuce and basil came from seed, and the chives were from a start I planted last year.

I encourage you to plant produce close you, either from starts or seeds. It's quite fun and satisfying when it comes time to cook, especially when you plant something that is cheap to grow but expensive to buy at the store, like herbs.

Gardening When You're Broke

If you want to bring newcomers to your garden, but you're short on cash, one thing you can do is check places where people are giving away plants for free.

A couple months ago, I looked under the "free" section of Craigslist and found an post for free grape hyacinth. This caught my eye because I planted some of these bulbs on my back porch at least a year before. I called the woman listed, and she set aside a grocery bag full of them that she thinned out in her front yard. My mom and I planted them along my fence and also at my front door. They will look much better next spring. It was a neat experience because I got to get free flowers for my garden and meet a fellow gardener. I hope to return the favor.

So before you go out to buy lots of plants, check online to see if someone is giving any away.

Blooming Chives

Sometimes I think gardens can oftwn resemble the illustrations of a Dr. Suess book. The chives in my garden are no exception. They are now blooming their puffy purple flowers and weighing down some of the long, thin green scapes (the part you dice and eat).

I ate one of the green the other week, and it tasted so fresh. I'll have to make some potatoes or another dish that I can add the chives to soon.

One thing I like about this plant is that I got it for free at a garden event. I'll write another post about how to get free plants later.

Flower Basket Resurrected

When Mother's Day roles around, that's when I start to see a lot of hanging baskets for sale. My mom usually gets one with fushias in it as a gift and has to keep my uncle from popping the blossoms open. He does this to my grandma's fushias as well.

I like to get my own hanging flower basket every year because it's so easy to take care of, adds nice color and hopefully attracts bees. There are a shortage of them partially due loss of habitat.

This past year I decided I would see if the flowers in my basket from last summer would come back. And they have! I think I might call them Frankenflowers. Other gardeners probably call them perrenials.

In the meantime, I've planted flower seeds I got for free at an Earth Day event in between the stems to add some variety.

I'd encourage you to buy or build your own flower basket. Bring those bees!

Apartment Gardening: Basil and Lettuce Plants Have a New Home

I took advantage of this morning's dry, cool weather by transplanting some of my plants. The basil, and especially the lettuce, outgrew their small spaces and needed room to expand. I moved lettuce from three small pots to one large blue pot and planted another round of seeds in the small pots again. Transplanting the lettuce was difficult because I planted too many seeds in each pot, so they were hard to separate and probably not very strong. I hope they survive.

The basil wasn't as difficult to transplant, but again, I should have planted fewer seeds in the small blue pot they were in. The transplants are now in a medium red pot and medium-sized leftover black plastic pot, and I planted some more basil seeds in the small pots.

Elsewhere on my windowsill, the forget me nots still have not come up. I think the seeds might be a bad batch or I should try something else. I need to do more research.

Apartment Gardening: The Peas are Growing!

It's been about a month since I planted snap peas in my garden. Now they have grown a few inches tall!

I installed a synthetic net along the fence this past weekend, so the peas will have somewhere to go in order to grow nice and tall. The first time I planted peas, they were starts instead of from seed. I made the mistake of not researching how to plant them. I didn't trellis them and the bugs ate the pods.

I wasn't about to make that same mistake. Hopefully, the net that I put up will do the trick.

If you have any tips about growing peas, feel free to post them below.

Apartment Gardening: Peas in the Ground

Every year I try to plant something new, and this year I chose to plant sugar snap peas. I love how sweet and crunchy they taste, and since they can be spendy at the store I thought it would be a good idea to try to plant myself.

I bought some Cascadia pea seeds from Territorial Seed Company at the Down to Earth garden store and some legume inoculant, which helps increase yield but I haven't used it yet. Instead, I soaked the seeds between wet paper towels in a Tupperware container for a few days until the seeds started to sprout. Then they were ready to be planted.

I scraped a trench close to the fence and placed the peas in a row in the trench. Then I covered them up with the dirt. That was a week ago. They are starting come out of the ground now. When they get tall enough, I will make a net with jute on the fence and wrap them around to encourage them to grab it and grow.

Apartment Gardening: Growing from Seed

It's finally spring and the March snow is gone, so now it's time to check on my seedlings. A few weeks ago, I planted basil, lettuce and forget me nots from seed. I remembered to keep the soil watered, and my memory has paid off. The lettuce already has two sprouts and the basil has one. That's not too bad considering my windowsill doesn't get a whole lot of light. I hope they turn out well because a lot of seeds come in a packet.

If you have any tips about growing seeds, let me know.

Chocolate Owls (and other baby shower cuteness)

I've never thought of owls to be a theme of a baby shower, but aparently it can turn out to be really cute. I attended a baby yesterday for one of my co-workers and from the food to decorations to games, it was about the details.

The food: the desserts have to be the cutest things I've seen in a long time. My favorites were the owl cake balls. The chocolate cake was the moistest cake I ever. Anothe co-worker of mine said that it may have been made by first make the cake, crumbling it up, mixing it with frosting, working it into balls and then freezing it. After that you dip it in melted chocolate and set it to harden. However it's made, it sure is some of the best cake I've ever had.

One of my favorite decorations was the photo display that had wires with clips hanging down like a tree. In addition to photos, it had pastel baby washcloths wrapped around white tissue paper and wrapped in clear celofane like a giant salt water taffy. It was very creative and looked easy to make.

The craftiness came full circle with the game that could be called "The Closepin Game." Every guest is given a tiny closepin. If one guest catches another guest saying a certain word, the can keep that person's pin. Our words were "baby" and "peanut", the baby's nickname. Our pins followed the them by having paper owls on them. Too cute!

All in all, the event was not only a treat to see such creativity, but a great time to celebrate and catch up with friends.

Wild Turkeys of West Eugene

One of the things I like about Eugene is the random things I see there.  On March 18, I was load my stuff in my car at a friend's house for a St. Patrick's Day sleepover when I heard something coming from the woods: turkeys.  They weren't just any turkeys.  They were wild.  There were about five of them in a group, and they looked intimidating.  I just had to snap a picture of them. 

I know around here we get raccoons, squirrels and nutrea, which you don't go near, but what about turkeys?  Do they have rabbies, or are they just territorial?  So I kept my distance as they gobbled loudly at me, took the picture with my phone and ran back inside the house to tell my friends about my encounter.  If you see the West Eugene Wild Turkeys, take a picture and send it to me, and I will post it on my blog.

Schef Schwander: Cooking Chicken Paprikash

Cooking chicken thighs is something I've never done before, and last night was my first time. I cooked a dish called Chicken Paprikash. You can find the recipe in the December 2011 edition of Food Network Magazine or here.

This dish was pretty easy. However, with all recipes, it's important to read the directions several times before you start cooking so you aren't as surprised by the next step. If it's your first time cooking this dish, I recommend prepping the food beforehand -- cutting, slicing, portioning out ingredients -- as much as you can so you can concentrate on doing the recipe right. While cooking this dish, I found myself rushing at times while chopping some of the ingredients because I worried others would burn. Thankfully nothing really burned.

This was somewhat the case when I went to prep the chicken. I have only ever cooked chicken breasts, not chicken thighs. I was supposed to cut them in half. But when I opened the package, I found that the thighs had bones in them with sockets, which I left in, so they weren't going to be cut exactly in half. For some reason I forgot that your thighs have a big bone in them with a socket to connect them to the rest of your body and the same was true for chickens. I think the last time that I had eaten a chicken thigh was from  a KFC bucket at a family reunion picnic when I was 9 years old. That just goes to show that I have a lot more cooking and eating to do, which I have no problem doing.

Instead of putting the chicken and the sauce on top of egg noodles, I served them on top of whole wheat spaghetti. I also used half a teaspoon on dried parsley instead of fresh parsley. It tasted really good. I served it with a side of cooked mixed veggies -- corn, carrots, and green beans.

Photo courtesy of foodnetwork.com

Schef Schwander: Cooking Yummy Pork Chops

Thinking of something great to cook tonight? You should try out this recipe I did on Friday. I made pork chops from a recipe I found in the December 2011 edition of Food Network Magazine. By the way, I love how the table of contents in the magazine has pictures of the food from the recipes inside. That way it's easier to look up what you want to make. Genius!

The pork chops I made were really tasty. The sauce wasn't as thick as gravy but was a great dipping sauce for the biscuits I made to go with them. It took about 40 minutes or less to make just like the recipe said.  What I did differently is I sprinkled dried thyme instead of using fresh time, because that's what I had.

If I could change anything about the recipe, I would have used boneless pork chops instead, or bought a better cut of pork in general.

I can't wait to try another recipe in this magazine!

Photo courtesy of foodnetwork.com